Dhaka

Dhaka runs on a single cash crop: garments. Over 80% of Bangladesh's export earnings come from textile and clothing manufacturing, and most of those factories cluster in and around Dhaka—a city of 22 million people built on a floodplain that goes partially underwater every monsoon season. This is the economic equivalent of a leafcutter ant colony that has optimized entirely for one food source: extraordinarily efficient under normal conditions, catastrophically fragile when that source is disrupted.

The garment industry didn't emerge organically. In 1978, Desh Garments and South Korea's Daewoo signed a collaborative manufacturing agreement that transferred Korean production knowledge to Bangladeshi workers. The logic was exploitative competition at its purest: Bangladesh's labor costs were so far below the global floor that no country could undercut it on price. From that single agreement, an industry grew to employ over four million workers—55% of them women—generating 11% of national GDP and transforming Bangladesh from a post-famine subsistence economy into a $460 billion economy that grew 7% annually for a decade before COVID and briefly surpassed India in per capita GDP growth.

The Rana Plaza collapse of 2013—1,045 workers killed when an eight-story garment factory pancaked in Savar—exposed what happens when an economy optimizes for cost above all else. The building had visible structural cracks the day before. Workers were ordered back inside. Every link in the supply chain had optimized for its own margin, and the weakest physical structure bore the accumulated weight.

Dhaka faces a compounding vulnerability no other megacity shares at this scale: the city sits on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, barely above sea level, in a country where two-thirds of the landmass went underwater during the 1998 floods. The garment factories generating 80% of export revenue are concentrated in a geography that floods regularly—niche construction in reverse, building economic future in the terrain most likely to destroy it. Dhaka sprawls across its floodplain the way water hyacinth spreads across a river surface: fast, dense, covering everything, but with roots that go nowhere deep.

Political volatility amplifies the geographic risk. The July-August 2024 uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina's government after student-led protests disrupted factory operations and export schedules, demonstrating how single-export dependency converts political shock into economic crisis. Dhaka metabolizes disruption the way a mangrove metabolizes salt water—constantly, painfully, and with no alternative habitat available.